It’s that time of year that’s just right for outdoor sports—and what better one to talk ‘bout right now than basketball. It’s all about constant motion, fast movement, and those literal slam dunk moments that lend them so well to cinematic action. So today, we’re as such not in fact going to talk about Space Jam—instead, it’s something that’s almost as funny as that one time Charles Barkley took on Godzilla (yes, that’s a real thing).
From Ron Shelton comes 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump—it’s the film that propelled a young Woody Harrelson from TV to the big screen, and starring Wesley Snipes before he became a super-serious vampire slayer. The Fresh Prince era is on full display in this one—in no other era besides the early nineties could you combine bright yellow with purple spandex, and that’s before we get Cypress Hill up on the soundtrack. Then again, for the vibrant Californian coastline setting, with all the colorful characters on display, it sure does fit the right atmosphere.
The storyline’s your quintessential odd couple setup—Snipes plays a fast-talking, smooth-as-silk street basketball player who ends up getting involved in a hustle by Harrelson, who makes a living exploiting the eternally arbitrary ethnic stereotypes around the game (fun fact, in days gone by it was once Jewish people associated with basketball, believe it or not). A partnership of sorts ends up forming—though Harrelson, it turns out, has way more to play for. Between owing money to the mob and trying to support his girlfriend (Rosie Perez, instantly recognizable if you’ve seen Do The Right Thing), there’s an extra dimension added to both the losses he takes thanks to others and his own inevitable cockiness.
You’ve got the street setting that makes everything feel a lot more interesting and relatable as our two go up against all manner of crazy characters on the courts of LA residentials—there’s no slick stadiums nor giant genetically lucked-out behemoths as you might get in the NBA, but there are tense free-for-alls where everything goes. You’ve got the charisma oozing out of Snipes, you’ve got Harrelson not being too far behind in the trash-talking department, and you’ve got some surprisingly snappy dialogue from everything about proper appreciation of Hendrix to that ever difficult questions of essential human communication. Between that and the hustling, there’s no shortage of material to keep you watching through it all.
I guess if there’s any weaker spot to the film, it’s that it feels a little less certain in keeping up plot beats once we get to a basketball tournament a ways in, and then after Perez gets her character’s own culmination of story arc. The scenes after that felt a little tacked on and unsure just how they were going to resolve it all. Not that it’s less watchable, but it slacks off a bit in keeping up the enjoyable snappiness earlier.
But with that in mind, whether it’s for the hoop-shooting or the fast-talking, there’s a lot here that holds up just fine. The film also has a little extra legacy in spawning one of the worst tie-in video games of all time (and considering the general quality of movie tie-in games, that’s saying a lot) with a disaster on the Atari Jaguar that, by all accounts, was about as playable as trying to play actual basketball underwater. While drunk. And trying to evade angry jellyfish at the same time.
Either way, check it out—it’s a damn sight better than anything Shaquille O’Neal put to screen. Or to music. Or to anything else besides soda commercials. I mean say what you want about Michael Jordan, at least he could emote above a monotone…
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